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Women In Horror Films

Duration: 120 min

Six Weeks on Wednesdays 8 May–12 June (7-9pm). The course will take place in the Community Room at The Crouch End Picturehouse Lecturer: Mary Wild

The horror genre in film follows from the literary tradition established by Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, eliciting physiological and psychological reactions through suspense, gore, the macabre and the supernatural. The position occupied by female characters in horror cinema is often ambivalent, ranging from victims of violence to perpetrators of dread. In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Sigmund Freud wrote, “The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology.” Even at the end of his life, Freud was preoccupied by a question that never left him: “What do women want?” This perception of ‘the unknown’ frequently drives the depiction of women in dark tales.

To interpret horror films, we will refer to concepts including Julia Kristeva’s abjection, Freud’s uncanny, Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, and R.D. Laing’s ontological insecurity. It is sometimes claimed that the portrayal of women in horror films is misogynistic, but here the proposition is that the horror genre affords us an indispensable language for approaching the complex dimensions of feminine subjectivity.